Two teams of engineering students–one graduate and one undergraduate–have been named finalists in the 2015 National Collegiate Inventors Competition.

This year’s Johns Hopkins entries include the Biomedical Engineering undergraduate team of Malvi Hemani, Melissa Lin, Kunal Patel, and Huilei Wang who invented a low-cost uterine contraction monitor called TocoTrack,  Designed for low-resource settings, the device is intended to assist midwives in rural clinics, helping them monitor accurately the progression of labor and, thus, reduce undetected complications, including prolonged or obstructed labor and severe bleeding.

The graduate student team is comprised of Electrical and Computer Engineering doctoral candidate Dimitra Emmanouilidou and graduate student Ian McLane, who invented a noise-canceling, programmable stethoscope. Also designed for low-resource settings and for users who have limited medical training, their smart stethoscope combines multiple microphones with sophisticated algorithms in order to eliminate environmental sound contamination and to provide automated diagnoses.

For the competition finals, student teams will gather in Washington, D.C. on November 17 to present their cutting-edge inventions to a panel of judges comprised of  National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees, United States Patent and Trademark Office officials, and scientists.

Johns Hopkins engineering teams have earned top placements in the competition in the past three years.

Excerpted from The Hub. Find the complete story here.